Curing fire schedule for a new Masonry Heater

This is the curing fire schedule that we recommend all of our clients use for curing a new masonry heater. You basically want to start out small with your fires and gradually add ~ 3-5# of wood per day. You are trying to slowly dry out all of the excess water from building your masonry heater and from any of the residual water in the cast refractory. If you heat your stove up too fast without properly curing it you can cause any of the water still trapped inside the bricks or castings to turn to steam and cause failure and cracking.

This entire process should take you about 5-8 days. Each of these fires in the sequence below should be done 2X per day with 6 hours between fires. This is a 60# firebox, so adjust your load accordingly to the size your firebox was designed for. We typically use ~3-5# of kindling and around 2-3 sheets of newspaper to light the fire with.